As schools adjourn for the summer, I was struck by a survey of Minnesota teachers recently released by the education reform group MinnCAN.  There are a number of fascinating things about it, but I’m most interested in a number that is getting very little attention.

                                    Younger Teachers Oppose LIFO

The more heavily publicized aspect of the poll has been about young teachers’ opinions on layoff rules.  There has been quite a hullabaloo over efforts in the Minnesota Legislature to change teacher layoff rules.  Currently, when school districts are deciding which teachers get laid off during difficult times, they can only consider seniority.  They can’t consider teacher input, parental input, principal input, relative improvement on test scores, or what an individual school needs at the moment.  Minnesota is one of just 12 states in the nation where seniority alone — last in, first out (LIFO) — drives such decisions.

Given that, it was certainly interesting that about two-thirds of teachers with under 20 years of experience believe that effectiveness, not seniority, should be the primary consideration in layoff decisions.  That poll finding suggests  the union is out-of-step with its younger membership on this issue.

                     Teachers:  One in Six Colleagues Are Ineffective

But even more interesting to me is a different finding in that same survey.  Teachers were asked this question:  “Based on this definition of effectiveness, what percentage of teachers at your school would you consider effective?”  The “definition of effectiveness” this question refers to is “the ability to advance student learning such that, on average, students demonstrate at least one year of academic learning during a school year.”

Teacher respondents said that 83% of teachers were effective, and 17% were ineffective.  There are 52,524 K-12 teachers in Minnesota, so this survey suggests that Minnesota teachers believe that something like 8,900 of their colleauges are ineffective (i.e. 17% of 52,524 = 8,929).

I don’t suspect that this 17% finding is much better or worse than other professions.  If you asked doctors, nurses, lawyers and other professionals, I am guessing their assessment of their peers would be fairly similar, with only a relatively small slice being judged to be ineffective.

But for two primary reasons, I worry much more about ineffective teachers than ineffective doctors and lawyers.

LIFO Protects Ineffective Teachers.  First, doctors and lawyers don’t have LIFO layoff rules, so those professions already have a means of getting rid of at least some of their ineffective peers. Ineffective doctors and lawyers can be laid off, “reorganized,” reassigned, or fired.  Ineffective teachers cannot be moved out of the classroom, unless they also happen to lack seniority.

Ineffective Teachers Hurt Kids.  The second reason I worry about having something like 8,900 ineffective Minnesota teachers in classrooms is that they can do a lot of damage to kids.   Research often cited by education reform groups like Students First finds that students with an ineffective teacher fall behind their peers by two to three months.

Would you be worried about the learning progress of a child who skipped two to three months of classroom time per year?  Well, there is a similar impact from having just one ineffective teacher, and hundreds of thousands of Minnesota kids have one of those 8,900 ineffective teachers  This is a very big deal.

For poor and minority students, the kids disproportionately being left behind, LIFO hurts even more.  On average, children in low income neighborhoods tend to have a higher proportion of teachers low on the seniority totem poles than students in wealthier neighborhoods.  Therefore, when LIFO teacher layoffs happen, schools in low income neighborhoods are constantly rebuilding.  This hurts educational continuity for  kids who badly need educational continuity.  LIFO inadvertently institutionalizes a teacher revolving door on schools serving the highest percentage of low income kids.

The fact that only 17% of Minnesota teachers are ineffective is the classic good news/bad news scenario.  The good news is that the number is low.  That’s a real credit to this heroic profession.  But the bad news is that the ineffective teachers that do exist can’t be removed from the classroom, because of LIFO handcuffs, and that does tremendous harm to children.

Legislators who point out the damage LIFO does to the teaching profession are not being anti-teacher.  On the contrary, they are sticking up for the 83% of teachers whose reputation gets unfairly tarnished by the relative few.  They are fighting for young, talented teachers being unfairly terminated.  In fact, removing Minnesota’s LIFO shackles would be one of the most profoundly pro-teacher steps the Legislature could take.

– Loveland

Note:  This post was also featured in Politics in Minnesota’s Best of the Blogs.